SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — What amazing times these are. Soon you may be able to watch your friends push around some virtual jelly beans stored in the cloud by using a pair of glasses that looks like you strapped a toaster to your head.

Oh, and you can pay for it with a cryptocurrency. It sounds so … disruptive.

Silicon Valley has always peddled more than its fair share of snake oil. But who can recall a time when investors in technology were sold such an expensive pile of fads, diversions and time wasters parading as innovation? Social networking. Game playing. Virtual reality. Now it’s all coming together they tell us. And when Apple Inc.
AAPL, -0.87%
puts a bigger screen on the iPhone, we’ll know we’re in a new age of enlightenment. A true giant leap for mankind.

Enough already. We’re not talking about meaningful advances for society here. What we’re really being sold in the most recent wave of technology stock offerings and eye-popping acquisitions is souped-up delivery systems for advertising. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but let’s call it what it is.

Make fun of the late-1990s, early 2000s “dot-com” boom all you want, but at least the companies debuting in that era sold things and had the decency not to ransack your hard drive for personal information.

OK, forget for a moment the societal value of today’s “innovation.” Are these good, long-term investments? Let’s take a look.

Box Inc. This is a cloud storage company that filed on March 24 for an initial public offering. Not only is Box in an already crowded space dominated by DropBox Inc. and Google Inc.
GOOG, -1.10%
its financial condition is alarming. Box has spent more than its revenue on marketing and sales in eight of the last eight quarters. In other words, Box is spending more than it makes. It’s losing money. Even the Box people say this won’t change anytime soon. “We have a history of cumulative losses,” Box’s S-1 states, “and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future.”

Oculus. Mark Zuckerberg’s latest deal is smaller, but feels just as forced as his last one. Facebook Inc.
FB, -1.26%
investors should be concerned about the company’s compulsion to spend enormous sums on unproven technology. Oculus is just 20 months old. Its virtual-reality glasses suffer from the same issues (motion sickness) that plague other makers. Its product isn’t even available to consumers. It’s now two years, $21 billion and two deals after Zuckerberg said “We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.” Should Facebook’s advertising fortunes turn and these products fail to catch on, Zuckerberg may be seen as myopic.

'Candy Crush' maker is hiring

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Despite a difficult initial public offering last week and broad questions about broadening its slate of games, King Digital is doubling-down by posting 165 new job openings.

‘Candy Crush Saga.’ The name of the company is really King Digital Entertainment PLC
KING, +0.39%
but fewer people know that than the name of the addictive game for which everyone is ignoring their family and blowing off work. Unlike some of these other profit-free tech companies, ‘Crush’ has 97 million users and netted King Digital $567.6 million profit last year. King Digital’s IPO debut Wednesday was rough, it sank 12% from its debut by Friday. Why? Investors may have amnesia, but they remember what Zynga Inc.’s
ZNGA, +0.40%
collapse — it went from $14.69 a share to $2.71 in six months — did to their portfolio, even if they don’t remember Farmville.

Circle Internet Financial. This is a product not ready yet for public consumption, but the buzz around this bitcoin company is loud in the tech community. Circle just raised $17 million in a new round of financing from venture-capital funds. Ultimately, Circle wants to cure the digital currency’s biggest problem: that is, you can’t use it. So, Circle says it will provide “stored value” cards, work with regulators and have a banking relationship so people can use bitcoins to pay for stuff.

As I understand it, you’d take your dollars, exchange it for bitcoin and pay Circle to change it to dollars or another currency. All of this is to say, Circle wants to be a bitcoin middleman. Maybe I’m missing something here, but isn’t the point of bitcoin to eliminate middlemen?

But what do I know? I use cash, don’t play games on my mobile device, my glasses don’t need a battery and I prefer to invest in companies that, in general, make more money than they spend, especially if they’re not doing anything terribly new or different. It’s an old-fashioned and, perhaps, out-of-touch way to live. Some might argue it’s not living.

I do have a toaster. Maybe I could put an ad on it. Is that disruptive enough?

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